An Ending & a New Beginning

The last page of OTD! shows a mother reading a letter from her son Jerome. As I’ve mentioned before, there was no love lost between Phil Kantz and his stepmother. This is an entirely fictional cartoon…although I’m sure my father lost a game or two of poker while in the service.

My father left the Air Force earlier than expected following an honorary discharge, and he returned home in August 1956. Thanks to the GI Bill, he started studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but he found the other students in the boarding house where he lived to be too young and immature—without his new worldly experience—and he didn’t enjoy his time there.

More importantly, he was in love with Sandi Steinberg back in Chicago, and he moved back there to be close to her. They married in December 1957.

My brother Gary was born in 1960, and I was born in 1964. (That’s Gary holding me in the middle picture below.) Phil and Sandi would go on to have six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren (so far). My mother would pass away in 2017, a few months before what would have been their 60th wedding anniversary.